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The Board of theEugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund

Norman Fiering
Providence, RI

Lynn K. Jones
Santa Barbara, CA

Marcus Keep
LeMoyne, PA

Leon Martel
New York, NY

Helmuth von Moltke
Hartford, VT

Robert Pollard
Palm Beach, FL

Willem Leenman,
Castleton, VTpresident

Paula Huessy Stahmer
Gainesville, FLvice-president

Raymond Huessy
Putney, VTtreasurer

The historical nature of man is the aspect of reality about which we have been basically and emphatically instructed in the epoch of thought beginning with Hegel... Rosenstock-Huessy has concretized this teaching in a living way that no other thinker before him has done.

Martin Buber

Rosenstock-Huessy continually astonished one by his dazzling and unique insights.

W.H. Auden

He was a thinker of startling power and originality; in my view an authentic genius of whom no age produces more than a handful.

Page Smith

Rosenstock-Huessy's is a powerful and original mind. What is most important in his work is the understanding of the relevance of traditional values to a civilization still undergoing revolutionary transformations; and this contribution will gain rather than lose significance in the future.

Lewis Mumford

Above all, Rosenstock-Huessy's writings show how the experience of the second millennium of the Christian era can serve as a prophecy of the future of the human race.

Harold J. Berman

It is unfortunate that Rosenstock-Huessy's thought has been so overlooked. For years he has been concerned with many of the same things theologians are grappling with today, that is, the meaning of speech, the question of hermeneutics, the problem of secularization, and the disappearance of a sense of the transcendent in modern life.

Harvey G. Cox

History of the Digital Archive

The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Digital Archive is the result of a two-year effort by the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund to organize, catalog, and scan the many thousands of documents held at “Four Wells,” Rosenstock-Huessy’s former home in Norwich, Vermont, before the collection was broken up.

Freya von Moltke had spent decades requesting missing letters so that both sides of Rosenstock-Huessy’s correspondence were represented in the collection. The Fund board felt strongly that her work should be preserved, but they faced a dilemma. All the “unique historical documents,” manuscripts and original letters, were to become the basis of the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Archive at Dartmouth’s Rauner Library; all the thousands of letters and other documents collected over the years as photocopies–including most of ERH’s own letters to others–could not become part of that archive and would be separated out for storage wherever it could be found. So preserving the existing collection could only be done electronically. The Digital Archive preserves Freya’s collection intact, and also contains a major bequest of documents from Cynthia Oudejans Harris as well as a few scanned images of related material already held at Rauner.

Work on the Digital Archive proceeded in two stages, each of which took about a year to complete. Creating the Digital Archive had been the brainchild of Leo Oudejans-Harris, who, together with his wife Cynthia, donated the lion’s share of the funding for the first stage of the project.

The first stage involved laying extensive groundwork for the final digitizing of the archive. Even achieving an accurate estimate of the scope of the project took some time; roughly cataloging the hundreds of folders kept in an upstairs bedroom came next, followed by the work of separating some folders into discrete correspondences (and combining and collating others); developing the protocols for data collection and the actual scanning–and assembling four teams to work in two separate four-hour shifts–was the last task of the first stage.

The second stage consisted of the actual scanning of the thousands of papers and capturing the data for each page-scan in the Digital Archive’s spreadsheet catalog. The second stage was funded primarily by the Foreign Office of the Federal Republic of Germany through the Cultural Affairs Department of the German Embassy in the United States. That generous grant was matched by donations from members of the von Moltke family. Other needed work on the Digital Archive, which could not be funded as part of either formal stage, was supported by other private donors in the US.

The successful completion of the project would have been impossible without the dedication and hard work of the project staff: Christina Chase, Steve Flanders, Joe Gaudet, Martha Howard, and Russ Pinigin, as well as Dorothy Gannon, Scott Gordon, Mitch Kewer, Steve Miller, and Diana Wright; the project supervisor was Raymond Huessy.

The Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Fund dedicates the Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy Digital Archive
and its use to the Fund’s long-time president,and the prime mover behind the collection
of all the documents not included in the gift to Rauner Library:Freya von Moltke.